How AstraZeneca Scientists, Data Quality and AI IT Teams Came Together To Accelerate the COVID Vaccine

In late 2020, against the backdrop of lockdowns and a global pandemic, AstraZeneca was striving to deliver a vaccine at cost. As the vaccine trials were drawing to a close, there was a need to accelerate the analysis of free text reporting by doctors as part of the trial. There was a need to stand up both the infrastructure and a robust NLP model in a highly regulated, high stakes environment. Ultimately, the team managed to transform the Covid-19 vaccine reporting process from days to hours. In addition to laying the foundation for an enterprise machine learning platform, this work was a small part of releasing the vaccine which has now saved an estimated million lives, prevented 50 million infections and delivered 2 billion doses.